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Console

It’s been a long time coming: the support for Oscar Vermeulen’s PiDP-11 console – in fact, I’ve been working on it, on and off, for over two years. Not that it was particularly difficult, but other things got in the way. The latest of those ‘other’ things was probably the worst so far – the roof of my work room started leaking, and directly above the table with all my FPGA setups on it. In short, I was lucky because I was at home and noticed immediately when the dripping started. But on the other hand I’m still months away from a return to normal, and I haven’t decided yet if I will ever restore my work room to its previous state of joyful disorder.

Back to the console. People have requested some kind of console like interface since I first published about PDP2011, and before Oscar came around, I always said that it was going to be very, very difficult. But something in my mind fired a spark when I saw the prototype panel he had made, and not long after I had the basics of the interactions done – and a sort of proof that it could be done. But interfacing the real panel also came with a couple challenges – that I had hoped to finish before the 2018 summer holidays, but looking back that was a bit too optimistic.

Still, at that time I was convinced it would only take one major change to finish things – the workings of the address selector knob. Again something that I had worried about, but that after I worked out how, it was actually not that difficult. But something unexpected did turn out to be difficult: how to actually drive the LEDs on the console.

In fact there were two challenges. First, to make the LEDs update as smoothly and frequently as possible without ghosting – lighting LEDs that aren’t driven by the intended signals. For the LEDs on the FPGA boards I was using for development that is not an issue, since all LEDs are directly connected to outputs. But on the PiDP-11 console panel, the LEDs are multiplexed and driven by a UDN2981A darlington array IC – and that really limits the speed by which the console can be updated. I’ve found that if the update speed is higher than about 30kHz, ghosting becomes visible – although it is a bit dependent on the types of LED, because my lab test board can deal with a bit higher speed. Then, also, the multiplexer itself needs several cycles to drive the banks of leds and read the switches. After some iterations to find out what works best, including cycles to switch from output to input and vice versa, and pause cycles in between driving banks of LEDs to further reduce ghosting, I’m now using 16 cycles to fully update the panel. Combine that with the (somewhat slower than full) speed I’m using to drive the multiplexer, in the setup I’m using now, the panel gets a complete refresh at a rate of about 435Hz.

And that brings me to the second challenge. At first, I thought it would be enough to show the state of a signal when the corresponding LED would be updated – in essence, taking a semi-random sample and showing that until the next refresh. But that turned out to be insufficient; some of the well-known wait loop displays didn’t work very well, and also the EKBA test program did not show the correct values. So I came up with the idea to do a simple or – if the signal was on in the period between panel updates, it would set the corresponding LED on. That also didn’t work very well… so with some reluctance, I should admit, I decided to implement the theoretically best solution given the multiplexed nature of the console: a counter that tracks how many cycles a signal is on, and setting a threshold for how many cycles will cause a LED to be on.

I was a bit worried that having adders for each of the LEDs on the console would make a real dent in the FPGA capacity, but no problem there. And it passes all the tests that the previous solutions didn’t – the wait loops look convincing, and all the well-known values appear as they should.

So, after some weeks of experimenting, playing with old software and running tests to establish the right values for the console update cycle and the LED threshold, that’s where I am now. There are still a couple of differences with a real console that I am aware of (and very likely a lot more that I’m not, but I’m counting on you to help me with those…)

On a real 11/70, the pause led lights up on a memory access – that is, a ‘real’ access, not one that is found in the cache. But since PDP2011 doesn’t have a cache, if I’d follow that pattern, the pause led would be lit all the time – correctly according to the description, but also different than ‘the real thing’ – most of the time. So I made a somewhat arbitrary decision not to set the pause led for memory access. It does still light up for NPR access, such as when one of the disk controllers is using the bus.

PDP2011 only shows the instruction word in the bus register – not the subsequent fetches. It’d probably not be overly complicated to implement, but for now, I kind of like it this way.

The microcode adr FPU/CPU display is completely different. The microcode state numbers make no sense for PDP2011, and also, when I tried to implement a couple of the more obvious ones, I found that the resulting display did not look very convincing in practice. So what I did instead is that I assigned one LED to each of the major instruction groups; so now the display gives a quick overview of what kind of instructions make up the bulk of the work for the CPU.

On top of that, microcode single stepping obviously does not work – after all, there is no microcode. And I’m not quite sure that the instruction single stepping shows all the right values, or if the LEDs are updated at the appropriate time – when pressing or releasing the switches, that kind of thing. But I think that overall I’m pretty close.

So, what’s next? Oscar and I were thinking on making a simple interface board to easily connect the console to the DE0Nano board – nothing complex needs to be done, it is just a matter of connecting the pins on the console board to the proper pins on the FPGA. But we haven’t gotten around to that yet. So, for now, the best thing is a bunch of wires, similar to what I’ve been using for my test setup – those 40-pin breakout cables that the Raspberry Pi community use are very helpful. And, if you use a DE0Nano board like I am, you’ll also still need to hook up serial port and SD card. For that reason, I’m not yet distributing bitstreams for the console – getting it to work is not yet for the faint of heart. But, the latest sources are on the download page – if you’re thinking of building a bitstream for the console, the directory cons-de0n-basic is the place to start.

And now, it is high time that I start working on SDHC support – but, it’s not the first time I said that, and, the roof still needs fixing…